I've been quite busy lately and haven’t quite got it together to write a longer piece I’ve been planning for this yet. So in the mean time, like a cat that cheerfully drags in dead birds and mice to its owner’s kitchen as some kind of respectful offering, I'll continue to post the occasional link to items that I think may be of interest to any potential readers.
This time around it’s a Slovakian concept album. Maybe it’s just too many years’ proximity to punk music, but I must confess that I’ve always been rather distrustful of the idea of the concept album. To my ignorant youthful self they were something or other to do with 70s prog-rock and best avoided at all costs. The release of The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free changed my mind somewhat. In particular it was the last track with its two alternative endings, which becomes much more moving and powerful thanks to the weight of the back story provided by the rest of the album. Rather than his first album full of the radio hits, The Streets' follow-up record was a slow-burner where the songs shared centre stage with the narrative context. Not always successful, perhaps, but always interesting.
And today I discovered another one, thanks to the Economist’s Eastern approaches blog. As well as reading the related article, you can listen to the whole album here. They say it better than I could, so I’ll quote:
A recently released rap album, Rezimy (“Regimes”), co-sponsored by the Open Society Foundation, takes listeners on a ten-song journey through the various regimes that Slovakia has seen in the last 30 years (...) In little over half an hour the album covers communism, socialism, the revolution, the short-lived Czechoslovak federation, meciarism and “freedom”. (...)
[It] paints realistic pictures of the everyday gloom under communism, the dangers latent in a young capitalism system and the tantalising tang of possibility that followed accession to the European Union in 2004.
I have no idea what they’re rapping about beyond the song titles themselves; perhaps you’ll have more luck. But the music and the delivery sound good, and the idea – to condense 30 years of national history into a 10-song album – is fantastic.
